The increasing processing power of telecommunications equipment has resulted in an increased volume of data traffic concentrated per unit of equipment. As well, increased equipment density due to enhanced ASICs is resulting in more lines per card, more cards per shelf, and even more shelves per equipment bay.
Functionality of equipment is provided by both hardware circuitry and software functions. Failures can occur in either of these elements. As well, failures of operation can occur due to faults within the equipment or due to circumstances exterior to the equipment. For example, a component on a circuit board may fail, or an optical fiber may be severed in the field.
Upon detection of a failure of operation or fault, telecommunications equipment normally produces a short message, known as an alarm message, which indicates that it is experiencing some condition or abnormality. Typically, the alarm message will contain information about the device issuing the alarm, the time of the message, and some description of the abnormal operation. Alarm messages may be considered symptoms of faults and a single fault may result in a large number of alarms.
Operational problems in networks can be difficult and time consuming to debug because a problem in one place affects many other network objects, and many alarms are raised at the same time
In the presence of alarms, it is necessary to trace the relationship between the alarms to understand what alarm may be signaling the root cause and which alarms are a consequence of failures entailed by the root cause.
Alarm association allows the operator to quickly:                Identify that a problem has occurred        Identify which network objects and services have been affected        Troubleshoot to find the objects closest to the cause        
Therefore, it would be desirable to have an error management display system capable of suppressing correlated alarms to simplify the presentation of alarm data for the operator.